“Real Housewife” NeNe Spills Her Guts In New Memoir

NeNe Leakes of “The Real Housewives of Atlanta” has lived such a tumultuous and charmed life that when she cautions to Never Make the Same Mistake Twice in her book, you’ve got to listen to the woman. As a former stripper turned “millionairess,” NeNe knows a thing or two about making mistakes.Never Make the Same Mistake Twice: Lessons on Love and Life Learned the Hard Way is a memoir chronicling the life of Linnethia Monique Johnson, from her modest upbringing in Queens, New York, by way of Athens, Georgia, to her luxurious life in Atlanta. And, boy, did NeNe have it hard. She was abandoned by her mother, raised by an aunt, and estranged from her father. (If you watch “The Real Housewives of Atlanta,” you know one of the running mysteries is: Who is NeNe’s biological father?) She spent six years in an on-off relationship with a man who beat and raped her, rejected their unborn son, impregnated another woman, and kidnapped NeNe at gunpoint. In order to make a better life for her son, Bryson, NeNe became a stripper in “upscale” Atlanta clubs (I hope not Strokers on Brockett) and then in private underground “jack shacks,” peep-shows where women expose themselves behind glass or two-way mirrors while the client masturbates.

NeNe was saved from a life on the pole not by a knight in shining armor but by her real-estate mogul husband, Greg Leakes, who put her up in one of Atlanta’s gated communities.